Yanez says some of the advantages of his version, besides being able to run it from a browser, include open access to video sharing sites (compared with Joost's limited content selection), a webcam chat widget, and right-click functionality for the mouse button.

New technologies have a way of giving rise to new art forms. One of the newest -- and most beautiful -- is a mobile-generated collective artwork emerging from an international art workshop at the Mix Studio in New York, led by French artists Olivier di Pizio and Gonzalo Belmonte.

Di Pizio and Belmonte are bringing together 20 French and American painters to create collaborative art, as they have done for more than 15 years. As in earlier collaborative work, each artist contributes photographs, documents, and other items from his or her own life and uses them in the work. This year, for the first time, the artists also will be using camera phones to populate a real-time collective media blog on Cellfish.com.

You can view the workshop on Cellfish.com, or receive the artists’ creations in real time on your cell phone. You can also go and see the collective digital creation at the FIAF Gallery in New York:

FIAF Gallery at the French Institute Alliance Française, 22 East 60th Street, New York
Free and open to the public, Monday, July 16, through Friday, July 27.
Gallery Hours: Monday through Thursday 11 am to 6 pm; Friday 11 am to 4 pm

But mapping isn't all that Immersive Media's technology is good for. The company's Web site shows applications for first responders (try clicking on the picture above), oil and gas exploration, tourism, film location scouting and sports broadcasting. The potential applications seem limitless. The demos on Immersive Media's site are videos, unlike the static photos on Google Maps. You can actually change the perspective of the video -- so that you're looking out the back of a car, for example, while you're driving down the street -- and you can stop the video to get a better view and look around some more.

Hard on the heels of Joost comes Babelgum with a very similar offering - a peer-to-peer, ad-supported, streaming Internet TV service featuring commercial rather than user-generated content. Oh, yes, and the founders are Europeans (one of them, Silvio Scaglia, is chief of Fastweb, an Italian broadband telecom company) and the product's name sounds more like a snack food than an entertainment service.

Babelgum opened its beta site today, and while the company warns that this is a "true beta" and glitches are to be expected, the product seems quite clean. The user interface is intuitive and non-intrusive, and I encountered a minimum of the video stuttering that I found to be such a problem with Joost. Unlike Joost, the picture size isn't infinitely adjustable - there are full-screen and window modes, with two sizes for each - but on the other hand the video quality was so good that I didn't feel tempted to play with the screen size. And that's because Babelgum is serious about quality - they require content providers to supply high-resolution files so that users can view videos on full screen.

The quality of the videos themselves (I'm talking about content now, rather than viewing quality) is surprisingly high. The offerings, though limited, include music, news, travelogues, cartoons, documentaries and short features. Like Joost, Babelgum says it expects to line up a large selection of commercial content from both major producers and independents.

The system for finding content needs a little tweaking. There are nine ready-made channels in the channel directory, (though only three of them appear in the menu bar when you first install the software) but they don't include all the content you would think they should. For example, the music channel only seems to contain seven videos, but there's actually lots more music available if you search for it.

You can create custom channels based on tags -- a very nice feature -- but of course the tags are only as good as the people who tagged them. Right now there's nothing tagged with Spike Lee, for example, even though he is represented on the Fiction channel by a short feature. So until there are more users doing more tagging, finding what you want to watch won't be easy.

All in all, Babelgum seems like a strong contender and yet another reason to expect bandwidth demand to keep skyrocketing.

Metacafe, one of the largest video sites on the Web, has announced that it will use adap.tv's advertising platform.

Grossology Live is broadcast over the Internet to live audiences who interact with the teachers/entertainers via videoconferencing. The underlying technology comes from Glowpoint, a managed video network, and LifeSize, a manufacturer of high-definition videoconferencing equipment. At present, the shows are broadcast only to the Columbus Children's Hospital's Community Education Center in Columbus, Ohio, and the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Tennessee.

The show is produced by the National Association of Health Education Centers and IDSolutions with funding from the National Science Foundation.

We waited two more weeks -- long past the time Joost said its technical problems were fixed -- to try it out. The verdict: still not quite ready for prime time.

On the positive side, the user interface is simple and intuitive. The on-screen channel guide and controls, which can be made to vanish with a touch of the Esc key when you don't want to see them, are far easier to use than, say, my cable provider's VoD menu. Keyboard shortcuts are also available.

The sound is fine, even on low-end PC speakers, and the quality of the video is potentially fabulous. I found the small-window mode consistently good, and the full-screen mode occasionally outstanding -- much better than anything on my (standard-definition) TV.

But potential isn't actual, of course. On most channels, the full-screen picture simply isn't clear enough to watch. My guess is that this has to do with the resolution of the original files, rather than with anything related to Joost. Fortunately, it's possible to scale the picture by dragging the corner of the viewscreen, so you can watch any content on the largest screen that's comfortable to view, instead of being relegated to the 2-by-3-inch viewscreen.

A more serious problem is the stuttering of the audio/video stream, which is often annoying enough to deter anyone who isn't writing a review. I don't think the problem lies in my hardware (brand-new laptop, Intel Core Duo CPU with 1.66 GHz) or my connection (cable modem with 10 Mbps downstream, and I really am getting the 10 Mbps). Either Joost isn't scaling up its servers quickly enough or the P2P software still needs more tweaking. When you use P2P for downloads, interruptions don't matter; with streaming video, they matter very much.

The forum on Joost's site is full of advice about how to make the audio/video stream more smooth. Some of these tips and tricks may work -- I don't know. The point is that if Joost aims to be a substitute for TV, it has to be accessible to everyone, not just to the sort of people who enjoy updating the registries on their PCs.

The software is also a bit unstable. After the first time I put it into standby mode, I tried to turn it back on again and got nothing but beeps and error messages. (It wasn't me, honest! I didn't touch it!) I finally had to remove and re-install the software -- a procedure that produced still more error messages. But I persevered, and now the standby/restore function seems to be working properly.

Unless you read the FAQs thoroughly, you may not realize that even after you've stopped watching Joost you are still using enormous amounts of bandwidth, enough to get you a stern warning letter from your ISP, or worse. You actually have to close the icon out of your system tray in order to stop the bandwidth drain -- a fact that Joost will need to make clearer to users when it goes live.

Finally, content is somewhat less than compelling, unless you enjoy trivia contests about music videos. (150 channels and nothing to watch!) But once the technical issues are resolved and the number of users increases, I expect that we'll begin seeing more interesting content as well. UPDATE 5/22: Joost just brought in the Creative Artists Agency (CAA), the world’s leading talent and literary agency, to help it negotiate deals for "the most compelling and entertaining content." That ought to do the trick.

All in all, Joost is a welcome addition to the world of Internet video. And if all the stars align properly, it really could change the way we watch TV.

The company is targeting two main audiences, professional bloggers (amazing that there are now enough of these to constitute a market!) and businesses. Detailed reporting capabilities let users track how many people are watching their videos.

All photos by Ken Lasley unless otherwise noted.

The John & John show: John Wells and John Hughes from Global Online Solutions Network (GOSN) talk about their fiber-based video surveillance application, which they market to real estate developers.



Salesforce.com VP Dan Dal Degan explains the AppExchange, which allows application developers to build and sell on-demand software on the Salesforce.com platform.



Fort Wayne Mayor Graham Richard, who was instrumental in bringing FiOS to his city, gives a keynote address at the conference.



Tim Scott, sales and marketing director for PacketFront, discusses the open-access fiber system in Vasteras, Sweden, where as many as 80 service providers offer broadband services to consumers and businesses.

Photo by Steve Ross.

Scott Lomond, president of SightSpeed, receives an innovation award from Mayor Richard and conference chairman Scott DeGarmo. SightSpeed's main product is a desktop videoconferencing solution, but it also offers a number of other video-based applications.



George Chamoun, Senior Vice President of Synacor, explains Synacor's Web-based portal for broadband providers.

Photo by Steve Ross.

- Market researcher Mike Render says that fiber-to-the-home is growing faster in the U.S. -- at rates exceeding 100 percent per year -- than earlier forms of broadband at comparable moments in their history. Take rates (percentage of homes passed that are subscribing) are rising for providers other than Verizon, which is building FiOS faster than it can sell it. Homeowners with FTTH, as well as developers, estimate that it adds about $5,000 to the selling price of a house, and businesses are relocating in FTTH communities.

- Humanizing Technologies showed us an easy way to make gadgets (what everyone else calls widgets) for your mobile phone. Their app lets you send dynamic time, weather, stock quotes, horoscopes, or any other web-based information to your phone in about three clicks.

- VizSeek from Imaginestics, using a technology developed in Purdue University, is a video search application for manufacturers. Doodle a picture of the part you're looking for, and you can find it in any parts catalogue on the Web.

With four separate tracks and the Applications Theater -- not to mention site visits to two Fort Wayne broadband businesses -- we couldn't see everything. So what follows is just a tiny sampling of the riches on display today:

- StashSpace.com digitizes all those boxes of home-movie videotapes that have been sitting for years in their customers' closets. Then they give customers online tools to edit the videos and show them off to friends and family. (We've written about StashSpace before, when it was still called HomeMovie.com.)

- Network2 searches the Internet for episodic short-form content (translation: series of short videos) and brings the best of them all together in one place. If you're tired of LonelyGirl 15 and you can't figure out what else to watch on the Internet, Network2 will help you find video that's interesting, funny, informative, cool or socially relevant. Are you still wondering about those superheroes? Today's presentation was given by Network2's official superhero, Chris Brogan (at least that was his title du jour -- if you check in with him tomorrow, he may be the company's Grand High Slizmux by then).

Lars Krumme of StashSpace.com (l) and Chris Brogan of Network2 (r).
Photo credit: TechnologyEvangelist.com

- Yesterday, the New Urbanists told us that good urban planning meant designing towns where people could walk to work. Today, we found out about applications that let people work from home. A real live Fort Wayne telecommuter, Tom Miller, told us how fiber-to-the-home had made him more productive in his work as a customer-support field engineer. Other presenters demonstrated Blue Otter, a Mac-based collaboration program designed for the publishing industry, and SightSpeed, a videoconferencing program that's used by many kinds of telecommuters. We've written about SightSpeed before here.

- Here's how high schools in East Allen County, Indiana are using their fiber-based videoconferencing system:
* Teaching classes in German, Latin, creative writing, landscaping, child development, African-American studies, entrepreneurship, Web design, and sports and entertainment marketing. These are classes that couldn't be made generally available without the videoconferencing system to aggregate students from all five high schools.
* Offering students college-level classes from Indiana-Purdue Unversity at Fort Wayne.
* Taking students on virtual field trips to the Baseball Hall of Fame and puppetry workshops, introducing them to their elected officials, and letting them watch surgeries and autopsies.
* Holding professional development sessions for teachers.
* Holding case conferences at a school for the deaf.

Inventor Ray Kurzweil
Photo credit: TechnologyEvangelist.com

- Ray Kurzweil, today's leading inventor, who has launched nine different industries and made computers read, talk, and play music, gave an exciting but dizzying keynote address about the accelerating pace of change. Moore's Law ("The number of transistors on a chip doubles about every two years," according to Intel's official definition) is only one instance of this general acceleration of knowledge, Kurzweil said. In a graph illustrating the pace of change from the evolution of RNA through to the Internet, Kurzweil showed that this acceleration has been astonishingly steady for billions of years. The reason: Every change builds upon the last one.

Kurzweil's lesson: Don't assume that the pace of change over the last 50 years will be replicated over the next 50 years. It won't. It will be immeasurably greater.

The lesson for killer apps: There's no question that any bandwidth we can provide today will be fully utilized in a very short time. Kurzweil foresees that within a few years, computers will disappear as separate devices and will simply be integrated into all of our everyday objects (clothes, eyeglasses, etc.) Everything and everyone, he says, will be permanently connected into a broadband network.

- In Bandon, Oregon, a small town that installed a new fiber-to-the-home network, high school students are now staying in town when they graduate, instead of leaving for bigger cities. The local art center is being expanded, a new golf course is being built, and the hotel is being refurbished.

- In Winona, Minnesota, the ambulances are outfitted with videocameras and transmit live video from accident scenes to the hospital emergency room, so the ER can be ready to deal with what's coming their way.

- In Lafayette, Louisiana, the community center sheltered evacuees from Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Because the center was fiber-wired, they quickly set up VoIP service and allowed evacuees to contact their relatives long before anyone else could.

- In West Valley City, Utah, the executive director of the UTOPIA fiber-to-the-home network not only keeps in touch with his grown children by videoconference, he even shares his TV with them through a Slingbox. Seems like fiber communities are getting more channels and better reception than others...

- Global Online Solutions Network is providing a "Safe Site" surveillance application to developers. The company brings in a fiber trunk and a headend and sets up motion sensors that trigger video cameras. The system helps developers monitor the site during building and can provide security services to homeowners once the lots are sold. Because the security team can always see what triggered the alarm, "there are no false alarms," the company's founders say.

- Some property developers are using "virtual flythroughs" on the Web to sell their properties. Others are creating replicas of new developments on Second Life. They can not only give homebuyers an advance look at the development, they can even sell the virtual houses!

Some of the content is beautiful, and some of it is silly. Much of it is only meant for friends and family, and isn't visible to visitors who haven't been invited to view it. But the site is generating a culture of serendipity - users celebrated Vimeo's second birthday in February by pushing their record buttons at the same moment (11:00 GMT on February 16) and filming whatever was happening in front of them. Here's one of the results:

Simultaneous Capture 3am Seattle, WA 02/16/07 on Vimeo

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